First responders must make rapid decisions in life-saving and life-threatening situations when dealing with hazardous materials that have been improperly released into the environment. This is especially true now with the threat of international terrorism. Prior to dealing with an actual terrorist or other incident involving suspected or known chemical hazards, emergency personnel must be adequately trained to properly react to the various types of hazardous events, for both their safety as well as public safety.
Given this, the incident commander must rapidly process information during a hazardous incident and make the appropriate decisions for action based upon his own cognitive abilities to mentally process such information with or without the help of subordinates. Although training manuals and field manuals may be available, timely access and processing of this information remains elusive, and decisions made on this less-than-optimal information may prove detrimental. Importantly, the known detection methods give the responder a variety of information, however the key is to understand is what you are using and why and to have a quick and efficient method of risk assessment of an chemical incident in minutes.
Hazardous Material (HazMat) Responders experience “information overload” that often results in responders over analyzing available research material causing incidents to be time-consuming, extremely costly, and labor intensive. Implementing change in existing methods to make efficient risk based decisions on virtually any chemical incident in minutes creates tremendous opportunities and dramatic challenges, often concurrently. There exists a need in the art for novel methods of quick risk assessment of chemical incident in the civil and combat situations. There is a need to integrate the required functional elements in order to respond adequately to a terrorist threat or chemical incident involving suspected or known chemical hazards.
The description herein of disadvantages and problems associated with known methods is in no way intended to limit the scope of the embodiments described in this document to their exclusion. Indeed, certain embodiments may include one or more known methods or method steps without suffering from the so-noted disadvantages or problems.